SOIL AND HEALTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 426, 22 August 1947, Page 5

SOIL AND HEALTH

Sir-I was glad to note the prominence you gave to Sir Stanton Hicks’s address on the intimate connection there is between the soil and the health of the people. Sir Theodore Rigg confuses good health with a low death-rate, Rousseau was right when he wrote two hundred years ago, "Life consists less in the length of days than in the keen sense of living." Some deficiency in our diet may account for the marked deterioration in the physical output of men, from the time when we were living on the products of a healthy virgin soil to the present time when we depend on chemical fertilisers. When I came to New

Zealand 40 years ago I was much impressed with the zest for life and work shown by the people here. The men could point with pride to the farms and homes they had created, the talk of the young men was often about the number of sheep they could shear, the acres of bush felled, or chains of fencing erected. The women seemed to manage with zest their targe families and housekeeping, and also their extensive hospitality. In those days bush was felled and the land grassed and fenced ready for production at a cost of £3 to £5 per acre. The cost for ‘preparing land for settlement was tabled in a recent debate in the House of Representatives as £25 to £75 per acre. Looking through my ‘records of about 35 years ago when practising as an architect, houses of a similar class to State houses could be built for 4/6 to 6/6 a square foot. Some of the State houses now cost, I believe, 42/- per square foot. (For correct comparison of above figures allowance should be made for rise in rate of wages from two and a-half to th: times). There are not now enough men physically fit to do the heavy work like mining, timber production, constructing hydro-electric schemes, especially tunnelling, where younger men are not replacing the older men when their working life is over. The same deterioration is apparent in the time it now takes to unload and load our seaborne traffic. Our hospitals are now unable to cope with the number of patients requiring treatment and our consumption of five million bottles of medicine annyally gives food for thought. Yet many white women, including New Zealanders, in a Japanese concentration camp in the tropics were able to do coolie work and work in the fields when fed on a coolie diet of rice, etc., produced in the age-

old way.

H. M.

HELM

(Pangatotara).